Re: Software platform for mc development.

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello, Mathieu!

> > (I think my suggestion would be Debian unstable for development and
> > Mandrake 9.0 for stability.)

I think that we need somebody using fresh mc on Debian and reporting bugs.  
I know that the UTF-8 patch for S-Lang used in Red Hat 8.0 originated on
Debian, so I expect that Debian may have similar problems as Red Hat 8.0,
at least in UTF-8 locales.  Maybe I'll install Debian soon for testing.

I really don't have a strong opinion about stability, and I'm completely
unprepared to discuss stability of Mandrake.  I know that sound engineers
in AT&T Labs like it because it comes with ALSA.

> RedHat and Debian official package are generally well tested, especially
> RedHat kernels that generally includes good Alan Cox's patches before
> Linus does.

We are going to a deep offtopic, but I installed RH 7.3 on a bunch of
computers with i810 video cards, and it wasn't fun.  The kernel panicked
on logout or shutdown.  The reason was one of such Alan's patches that
wasn't in the Linus' tree.  Red Hat later released a fix.

The relevant part is that no amount of good engineering and programming
experience can replace formal testing.  That's why the developers should
use different systems.  Asking "what are you guys using, I'll use it too"  
is exactly the wrong approach for a potential developer.

> I was thinking that by default, RedHat, Mandrake and Debian use shadow
> passwd. 

But only Slackware doesn't have PAM, which is always preferred over direct 
access to any configuration files.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin